written by Toke Lykkebjerg for a book project (coming out in 2010)
The closer one gets to the drawings of Theis Wendt, the more one loses sight of what he is drawing. Seen from afar Theis Wendt’s oversize drawings are figurative. Up close they are but a mess of lines. In a way this is also the principle underpinning impressionism or the art of the mosaic or television. And yet it is quite different. Up front one loses sight of the subject in an impressionist painting or a mosaic or a television image, because the units, respectively brushstrokes, tile stones and pixels that make up the whole, are subjected to the whole. But in Theis Wendt’s drawings one loses sight of the subject up front, because the units that make up the whole, namely the lines, refuse to solely make up a whole.
As Alain put it back in 1927, “the line is the true invention of the drawing”, and this feature is something Theis Wendt does his best to bring to the fore. Theis Wendt’s drawings are namely not just made up of lines. Furthermore, his lines are rebelling, one might say, against their primary function as constituents of a subject whatever it might be. The lines do not fully comply with their designated role in the figurative drawing : When Theis Wendt is drawing wires or branches, it looks like an excuse for simply letting go of the line; When he is drawing treetops, the only reason they are not simply perceived as pure doodles is because of the elaborate tree trunks beneath them; When he is filling out space by hatching so as to create surfaces in his drawings, all these parallel lines at some point tend to take off each in its own direction so that the very same surfaces dissolve.
The result of all this is also the reason why Theis Wendt’s drawings seem awkward, unruly, maybe even childish. In this respect his work shares with Cy Twombley’s drawings what the thinker Roland Barthes has identified as something infantile and thus unspeakable: “The child is the infans, the one who does not speak.”
Like any other figurative picture Theis Wendt’s drawings set out to speak about something, whether it be nature, war, rebellion or something else. But the lines that depict the objects through which the artist speaks about all these different themes continuously deviate from the object they are about to designate. This infantile aspect might be a defining trait of Theis Wendt’s work. It might even be all-pervasive, but is it not all-encompassing. Therefore it can in no way be mistaken for children’s drawing. The drawings which impress the viewer by their sheer size stand in sharp contrast to the frailty of the fine lines. This discrepancy testifies to the general complexity of the work in question. Theis Wendt’s compositions have during the last couple of years become as ambitious, tight and well-ordered as his line is loose. In line with the writer Gustave Flaubert’s aesthetic principle that “one has to describe the mediocre well” one could say that Theis Wendt presents the infantile ineloquence eloquently. Hereby Theis Wendt continues a tradition within Western art and thinking that harks back to the 19th century and even beyond, namely the tradition of giving voice to that which does not have a voice. The context, however, is unmistakably specific to the end of the 20th century and the turn of the millennium.
Theis Wendt is part of a new generation of artists with a double background. His training as a contemporary artist at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen is counterbalanced by his early training as a graffiti writer.
Since the 60s graffiti has developed from raw and unrefined writing into a most eloquent and stylized way of painting. Graffiti as eloquent style is also something Theis Wendt has been practicing. Nevertheless his current drawings seem the complete opposite of current mainstream graffiti. Stylewise his drawings look like products of a deskilled graffiti writer. His drawings nevertheless share a basic concern with graffiti which the question of style occludes, i.e. the strategy of rendering something invisible visible.
Since the invention of the printing press, letters have become more and more formalized and standardized in such a way that they have become entirely invisible. Calligraphy and especially the calligram where text and image are intertwined is a thing of the past. Seeing and reading have gradually become two separate processes that mutually exclude each other. Within the visual arts this purification of writing culminates with the conceptual artists of the 60s and 70s. The so-called dematerialization of the art object which is how artist and theorist Lucy Lippard has summed up their artistic undertaking also resulted in a dematerialization of writing. Materials, be it paint of letters or whatever, were of no importance. The only thing that mattered was signification. These artists’ penchant for Helvetica in their word-based practice was motivated by the universalism that Helvetica was set to offer. Ideally this was the font that people read but did not see. The public was supposed to get the meaning, not the letters. It was the font that detached reading from seeing by use of letters that were so neutral they passed unnoticed. Helvetica was ultimately of interest, because Helvetica was transparent.
The first graffiti writers that are the exact contemporary of the first conceptual artists did the exact opposite. Painting that which conceptual art effaced, namely the materiality of letters, they painted the invisible in stark colors so it became visible to anyone. The graffiti writers’ quest for visibility was not just of political concern for underprivileged youngsters in poor communities. It was also a genuinely aesthetic proposition. By rendering the written word at least as complex as bygone calligraphy, they confronted people with writing that they could no longer read, only see. The eloquence of the graffiti style thus undermined the eloquence of writing, namely the primary function of the written word, which is signification. This is why social thinker Jean Baudrillard dealt with graffiti under the caption “The rebellion of the signs.”
Though the ineloquent style in Theis Wendt’s drawings is the complete opposite of the eloquent style of advanced graffiti, he ultimately proposes something similar to the rebellion of the word, namely a rebellion of the line.
Despite the ongoing relevance of graffiti to a deeper insight into the work of Theis Wendt, the aesthetic position of the artist does not oppose that of conceptual art. The six years he has spent at the Art Academy has most certainly made him sensible to what one could call the anti-aesthetic aesthetics of conceptual art that has had an enduring effect on contemporary art. This is especially evident in the minimal aesthetics of Theis Wendt’s work in public space, but it is also present in his works on paper and canvas. As Emma Dexter has suggested, drawing as a medium first gained its legitimacy within the arts in the 60s and 70s. The conceptual artists saw the medium as the least material of all the media. A case in point could be Joseph Kosuth’s platonic critique of Robert Smithson for compromising his own ideas by materializing them. He found Robert Smithson’s sketches for his works closer to the artist’s ideas than were the actual realizations of these ideas.
Theis Wendt knows this problem very well. As he has realized, some ideas can only be materialized in drawing. Theis Wendt mentions his drawing Keep it Street, that depicts a full moon covered by big tags, as an example. After he in vain had proposed the work to an art institution as a wall drawing, he found that a plain drawing might suffice. The result is a work that presents the viewer with a disillusioned vision where even the most distant spots in the universe are sullied by the most vile form of human expression, namely unwanted self-promotion in the name of tagging. “One might imagine”, says Theis Wendt, “two lovers in a romantic moment sitting holding hands on a bench while looking at a full moon that has been completely sullied.”
The rebellion of Theis Wendt’s line is echoed in his choice of subject matter. Political activism, piracy and various insurgencies are recurrent themes in his drawings. Hereby Theis Wendt’s deviating line that refuses to simply tell a story can be seen as a way of showing us his subject instead of telling us about it. This is also part of another strategy of Theis Wendt whereby he deals with a subject by complicating it. One example could be his Pink Rabbit Barricade (Tribute to Geletin), where a huge puppet is not simply a barricade since there’s nobody on the other side of it. It also acts as a substitute for the rioters that are in infight with the riot police. The battle recalls current political riots in Copenhagen and in other big cities for various meetings and summits, but the two combatants are not inhabitants of the same world. This is not a war, given that a war is governed by rules that standardize and regulate the two sides and their otherwise vile conduct. The big rabbit which the surprised police forces are facing makes the very battle unreal. The ridiculous incongruity of the two sides described in the drawing counters the reality transmitted through the media when covering the mean political activists’ clash with the tuff authorities.
Theis Wendt also complicates his subject matter by historicizing current events. His many drawings of pirates are made in a time where so-called pirates make pirate parties and seem to roam everywhere from the coast of Somalia to the Internet. Nevertheless Theis Wendt draws pirates that aren’t very different from the stereotypes known from Pirates of the Caribbean and other cultural products. In Sweet Crooks the clash between neo-piracy and historical antecedents, between now and then, becomes apparent. A coast guard in a boat projects a torch on a caricature of an old pirate ship. The pirates on the ship look like nothing but badly drawn cartoon figures. The cast light reveals the incongruity between two different historical periods that are acted out as a clash in the drawing. The concept of piracy and thus of illegality is ridiculed by its literal transcription into an image. The festive farce recalls Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings whose surreal scenarios sprang from the painter’s literal translation of Dutch figures of speech and idioms into images.
Pirates of all periods and other rebels interrupt the way of the world by pointing in new directions. The drawing is in certain respects an obvious guide. It can give voice to what we have not seen yet. Paul Klee articulated why: “A drawing is simply a line going for a walk”. And such a walk does not necessarily lead in the reading direction which formats the way we decode the visual environment of today.
Disrupting the reading direction has been a basic concern within old school graffiti that has been integrating arrows into lettering so as to mislead the reader. The consequent confusion is also to be found in Theis Wendt’s drawing See Ya On Mars. Here we see an astronaut who has just landed on Mars. It is the image of man in a high-tech age who is completely lost. His fear is manifest: Arrows pierce him from all sides. It is as unreal as a nightmare. The only danger seems to stem from a Red Indian reflected in the astronaut’s helmet. This adventurer’s experience of new territories is obscured by comical prejudices about unknown dangers. The astronaut is a modern-day version of the martyr Saint Sebastian, who is also normally rendered pierced by arrows but isolated from the archers, i.e. the source of danger, that are not in sight.
However big Theis Wendt’s drawings are, there is always more than meets the eye. There is an outside-the-frame and a subject that is never fully finished. Though the drawings might be neatly composed, the lines constantly lead the viewer astray. When Theis Wendt wants to tell us something, he is always showing us more.
I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; from now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away.
- 1 Corinthians 7: 29-31
Utopian practice makes sense, however, only if it is linked to the practice of revolutionary struggle. The latter, in its turn, cannot do without such utopianism without being condemned to sterility. Those seeking an experimental culture cannot hope to realize it without the triumph of the revolutionary movement, while the latter cannot itself establish authentic revolutionary conditions without resuming the efforts of the cultural avant-garde toward the critique of everyday life and its free reconstruction.
- Philippe Canjeurs & Guy Debord: 'Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program' (1960)
Workers Needed in the Miniature Cultural Bomb Shop
Written by Kasper Opstrup for a book project (coming out in 2010)
Today, we are living in a hyper-aestheticised world where we are being non-stop exposed to a visual overload of sensory images telling us subliminally what to think, do and buy while popular culture supplies a seemingly infinite archive of emotions to be instrumentalised symbolically and allegorically. The power of the spectacle is used to overwhelm its spectators and is turning the world into an eternal present where resistance is ostensible not possible since everything is being continuously reinvented and we seem to have a collective ineptitude to discern truth and beauty. In the same way, public space itself has become subject to a constant barrage of images, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities, etc.; a colonisation of the subject analogous to Empire's colonisation of the life world. It is the culture of the brand-value of art where aesthetics can be instrumentalised for whatever purpose but often are tools of power and consumption and where the world is no longer a stage upon which we are all actors; it has become an illusion.
The distinct feature of this age of global capitalism is its deep and profound doubleness where visual imagery is not only aesthetics, it also carries a political grammar, resulting in that the contestation of power partly becomes a struggle over the image-machinery and a war on appearances. Visual languages can be used both for promoting mindless consumerism and hypnotise us into a slumber as well as be a medium for agitprop and wake-up calls through coding, over-coding and symbolic production in general. This strategy of using visual representation for instrumental purposes is by no means a new invention. It dates back to, at least, the Counter-Reformation where access to the means of production of art and theatrical spectacle were reserved for a small elite whose role was to support the world view held by king and church and reassure the populace in a time of perpetual warfare. During the 19th century the bourgeois category of art came into being (as an essential commercial genre) resulting in a sort of free space for the artists to occupy themselves with and giving them a fool's licence to criticise as long as they remembered that art was an autonomous sphere and as such not directly connected to the social and political spheres. Nevertheless, there were strong connections to radical politics with, for example, the Realist painter and Anarchist Gustave Courbet who famously participated in the Paris Commune in 1871.
The early modernist avant-gardes attacked this bourgeois notion of the autonomy of art and, as such, marks the first time where the overlaps between art and revolution were brought to the forefront in their attempts to destroy the bourgeois institutions and reconcile art with quotidian life. Due to the construction of the category of art itself, art is always already politicised and throughout the 20th century there was a strong utopian current with artists who suggested or even generated alternative social models through the production of art where the desire for social change led them to align themselves with wider social movements or to break with the established institutions of art. The following is a short historical examination of this artistic dream of revolution with examples from Italian Futurism as well as the UK Underground in order to reflect upon the overlaps of art and revolution in the contemporary with its apparent institutional embrace of politically-themed art.
Art movements preoccupied with social change and operating in the concatenations between aesthetics and politics have traditionally been labelled “avant-garde” due to that in their self-opinion they were nothing that we would not all one day become. The birth of the avant-garde is commonly dated to 20 February 1909 when Filippo Tomasso Marinetti published the first manifesto of Futurism in the French newspaper Le Figaro. This manifesto is a potent combination of performative speech-acts, Symbolist imagery and Anarcho-syndicalist ideas. The Futurist group had a background in Anarchism and Marxism and wanted to re-invent culture in its totality.
The manifesto was primarily inspired by the French Syndicalist Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence (1908) which had been serialised throughout 1906. For Sorel, it was a catastrophe that would enable us to reach full modernity. The overthrow of what was had to be pure aggression and violence based on revolutionary images that would make us believe in future success and the glory of war – the world's only hygiene according to Marinetti who also claimed that no work without an aggressive character could be a masterpiece. Sorel's revision of Marx ended up with doing away with everything but the class struggle which he saw as the essence of Socialism, thus enabling Marinetti to write that “except for struggle there is no more beauty”, a struggle directed against the “stars”, everything above us, which would soon give way for the dawning of a new day. At the heart of Sorelian revisionism was a rejection of rationalism and this also finds echoes in the manifesto where “[o]ur fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors – perhaps!...Of only it were so! - But who cares? We don't want to understand!”.
Instead of rational explanations, Sorel proposed the 'social myth' as the instigator for a new type of rebellion. The myth was comparable to “an artistic image intended to make us assimilate an idea”, i.e. any kind of emotionally potent oversimplification which people would fight for. Clear and distinct ideas were inadequate rules for action “for we do nothing great without highly coloured and sharply drawn images that absorb all our attention”. A utopia can be broken up in all its parts where the myth instead is a unified whole relying on instinct and imagination instead of rationalism and dogmas. Sorel's call for a revolutionary aesthetic was answered by Marinetti's aesthetic violence and it can be argued that the first Futurist manifesto is Marinetti's attempt to create a Sorelian myth and produce a new art for a new world where art and revolutionary energy would be combined in order to make a total transformation of the life-world. The world as it is must be erased to make way for this desire for godlike powers of total creation, but creation through destruction which is a logic that inevitable leads to violence. Even though Sorel was still an anarcho-syndicalist in 1908, his idea about a social myth would be influential in the trajectory of Fascism in Italy as well as National Socialism in Germany, which was hyper-aestheticised as can be seen in, for example, Leni Riefenstahl's documentary film Triumph des Willlens (1934), showing a highly orchestrated Nazi Party congress in Nüremberg. Sorel's personal myth was about what he called the 'proletarian general strike' (in opposition to the 'political general strike') which aimed to destroy the state, to put aside all discussions of reforms and instead confront men with a catastrophe that would result in an irrevocably transformation, a “point of departure of en era having no relationship with the past” without putting forward any project of future social organisation. The Futurist revolution, as it is presented in the first manifesto, was intended to make the world perfect by replacing it with a total, unspecified alternative. The catastrophe they longed for came in the form of the First World War which Italy, and with it the Futurists and the Nationalists who together would influence the rise of Fascism, joined in 1916. It did not live up to the aesthetic expectations.
After the Futurist explosion, the trajectory of the modernist avant-gardes can be mapped from Constructivism to Dada and Surrealism, groups that kept the close alignments to Anarchism and Communism. After the Second World War, Surrealism had lost its momentum and new movements started to emerge. The Situationist International (SI) can be seen as the last modernist avant-garde from a Western perspective due to its insistence on going beyond the categories of art and politics themselves and developed both a revolutionary practice and a revolutionary theory from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. The early SI, created in 1957 by a fusion of various post-war artistic movements such as The Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, led by Asger Jorn, the Lettrist International (LI), led by Guy Debord, and Ralph Rumney's London Psychogeographical Association, split up in 1962. Roughly speaking, the split can be seen as a separation of the ludic and the analytical. The former aspect of SI is often seen as being continued by the Bauhaus-Situationists, or 2nd SI, around Jørgen Nash in Scandinavia, while the latter is seen as being continued by the specto-Situationists, or 1st SI, around Guy Debord. Before the split these tendencies were a unified practice where there were an unmistakable expression of the twofold and indivisible use of action and representation, of political and aesthetic means in the situation. As they wrote in the early 'Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play' (1958), it is a matter of 'struggle' and 'representation': 'the struggle for a life in step with desire, and the concrete representation of such a life'”. In the UK, the legacy from the first SI took another trajectory where it fused with ideas from the Beatniks in order to create an international, cultural-revolutionary underground. In the years from 1964-7, these activities where centred around the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi who had been a member of both LI and SI until he resigned from the latter in 1964 to pursue his sigma-project which was defined in Sigma Portofolio 18 (1964) as “in accordance with the natural evolution of the Situationist point of view”. Sigma was initiated with the essay 'A Revolutionary Proposal – The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds' (1962) and the self-proclaimed 'sigmanauts' – explorers of inner space - included, among other polymaths, William Burroughs, Wallace Berman, Allen Ginsberg, John Latham, R. D. Laing and Jeff Nuttall. They were also in contact with, for example, the New Experimental College (Da.: Eks-skolen) in Copenhagen due to that one of their ideas was to be an international 'database' registering and organising all groups involved in the 'creation of situations' on a global level.
Mobility in terms of practice defined sigma. It would be a communal affair with tactics decided in-situ, depending on what would be available when where “no one is in charge and no one is excluded”, pointing towards the Anarchist roots of Trocchi's thinking. Keywords were play and participation combined with an autonomous stance in relation to society which included self-organising, self-publishing, self-distributing, self-institutionalising, etc. At the same time, it was a move beyond both art and politics where art needs to be its own suppression and question its own validity. The first step towards the cultural coup-de-monde would be to do away with the brokers and the gallery system, cutting out the middle-man. That being said, they were acutely aware that one can only be successful on capitalist terms in a capitalist society, since “the confusion of value with money has infected everything”, cf. the business part of sigma, Cultural Enterprises, Ltd., which focused on commission jobs and consultancy as well as cultural engineering and promotion. For sigma, it was no longer possible to stand outside capitalism which meant that there was nothing to do but live out its contradictions.
In contrast to Futurism, the revolution would no longer be a violent revolution but a mental revolution where art, happenings, street theatre, interventions into everyday life inspired by the Dada movement in Berlin and Marxist theories of the role of culture in post-industrial society, were meant to raise consciousness and undermine the existing institutions through effecting a change within individuals ultimately resulting in collective social change. The audience needed to be shown a revelation which the artist became the architect behind, thus raising their awareness from passive spectators to active participants and co-producers of the cultural moment. Trocchi's purpose with writing 'The Invisible Insurrection' was to establish an “international association of men who are concerned individually and in concert to articulate an effective strategy and tactics for [...] cultural revolution”. The activities were expected to “snowball”, thus instigating the invisible insurrection through “mental jiu-jitsu”. The enemy was unconscious thinking, lack of awareness, alienation, time itself, showing the debt to Marinetti who, in his first manifesto, proudly declared that “time and space died yesterday”.
What was to be done after doing away with the brokers was to self-institutionalise a sort of utopian community, reminiscent of Charles Fourier and William Morris as well as the Experimental College at Black Mountain, North Carolina. These “spontaneous universities” were to be placed outside all major cities in the world, teaching us “how to be if we are to be and do together at all”. The goal was to create universal community in which art and life were no longer divided, “a new conscious sense of community-as-art-of-living” which was to be regarded as “a continuous making”, as Trocchi wrote in 'Sigma – A Tactical Blueprint” (1963). The various sigma-centres were meant to be propaganda-by-the-deed and work as examples for society at large. More concretely, some of the ideas growing out of sigma was Cedric Price's and Joan Littewood's Fun Palace, a project focused on socially interactive architecture and adaptability not unlike the Dutch Situationist Constant's ideas about a New Babylon as well as New York Free University, London Anti-University, John Latham's Artist Placement Group, the Arts Lab and other related enterprises in the 1960s and early 70s. As flower power evolved into armed struggle, the mentality started to change though. It was no longer about dancing in the streets, it was about disintegration, getting fucked up, nodding off, maybe dying, and sigma disappeared among psychedelic experimentation and heroin addiction. This shift might be connected to a disappointment with “real” politics, the system's lack of response. When collective mass action fails to encourage social change, it seems the common reaction is to either drift towards militancy or towards a more mystical approach to individual salvation where it is no longer social activism but inner growth that becomes a practice of liberation.
The goal for the revolutionary avant-garde movements in general was to criticise and overcome alienation and, ultimately, to realise themselves and become sublimated into everyday actions in a public sphere which is both creative, social and political while still insisting on themes from the modernist avant-gardes even though that position has become increasingly difficult after the 1960s. In short, these themes necessitates the transvaluation of all values and the overcoming of the specialisations of society in order to become un-alienated man, the non-specialised specialist, or the professional amateur, as Asger Jorn called him, just like he is described by Marx in the beginning of The German Ideology (1845) where he can do “one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner [...] without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic”.
Besides the political current, there is also a strong occult current in this sort of counter-cultural thinking with The Morning of the Magicians (1960), the search for Atlantis, the Age of Aquarius, etc., a current partly due to the messianic belief in a New Age, partly to the crisis of rationality and the Enlightenment project which Futurism also pointed towards and which led the artists to search for alternative ways of rigging the world. The counter-culture of the 1960s was, based on the perceived rationality and uniformity of the Nazis during World War II, pre-occupied with a critique of conformity and the 'squares'. Before the second world war the project for the cultural left was always connected to the masses as the revolutionary subject, an idea shared by Futurism, but after WWII the mainstream became the enemy. Perceiving that the Nazis were basically the masses turned evil by obeying orders, staying in line and keeping community, conformity became something to avoid.
This quest for distinction resulted in that the counter-culture and the conceptual and performative art practices of the 1960s can be seen as helping to give birth to a new, post-Fordist capitalism which does not rely on production and property; it is more dependent on consumption, the buying and selling of commodities and creativity. The consumer replaces the citizen and the promise of commodity abundance becomes a substitute for social revolution. Paradoxically, it is thus rebellion, not conformity, which for decades has been the driving force of the market place and the market does a good job in responding to the demand for anti-consumerist products. The ideological system that sustains capitalism has not seemed to be too troubled by various acts of counter-cultural rebellion. Sigma was about participating in the ultimate come-together, a dream-demand for culture rupture on the verge of full-blown romantic utopianism where the revolution would happen due to simple acts of pooling resources and share knowledge but it was also about the independent production of cultural entrepreneurs using guerrilla marketing to advertise and sell their commodities and creativity, it was about a limited company that wanted to be successful in capitalist terms, a strategy which today seems to be important for the general success of capitalism, cf. Richard Florida's ideas about a new creative class which is seen as a key force for economic development. Society's distinct doubleness is reproduced on a micro-level in counter-cultural thinking (and Anarchism) and the parallels that exist between right-wing libertarian ideology and left-wing counter-cultural theory where the key difference between left and right in this context concerns the status of private property.
The obvious critique is of the naivety in believing that art, poetry and music can have a direct and controlled political effect in the world in itself, that it is something that can save us from alienation and separation. Cultural revolt and lifestyle anarchism are not enough to challenge capitalism if the aesthetic actions are not followed by social actions. 'Freeing the imagination' does not seem to galvanise the proletariat, much less cure injustice, eliminate poverty or stop war. Due to that it tends to be temporary individual-anarchistic eruptions more than the constitution of permanent alternatives, it often seems to be rebellion that provides entertainment for the rebels instead of social change. “How many times can the system be subverted without any noticeable effect before we begin to question the means of subversion?”, as Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter ask in their (very conservative) The Rebel Sell (2005) while adding that “[e]ver since the 1960s, hip has been the native tongue of advertising, 'anti-establishment' the vocabulary by which we are taught to cast off our old possessions and buy whatever they have decided to offer this year”.
After the 60s, it seems like the critique of social injustice, traditionally voiced by the worker's movement, to a certain extent has been drowned out by marketing language co-opting the critique of alienation and unhappiness voiced by artists and bohemians through their rhetoric of decentralisation, creativity and network-organisation, thus neutralising the appeal of radicalism and re-organising capitalism into the flexible knowledge economy of today, as Luc Boltansky and Eve Chiapello find it to be the case in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999).
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the opposition to capitalism was re-invented as pluralist and heterogeneous, giving birth to the so-called 'movement of movements', as Will Bradley points out in his introduction to the reader Art and Social Change (2007). In the 1990s and early 2000s, there were a tendency to that art would operate on activist terms in the context of these so-called anti-globalisation movements. After Genoa 2001, it become clear that instead of attacking IMF, G8 or WTO, the new forms of direct action would have to be more diffuse, combine components of visibility and invisibility, and become interventions into everyday life leading many artists and activists to rediscover political struggle as artistic intervention. Many, who rejected vanguardist organisation in favour of immediate and specific action, found room in these movements and, under influence from the counter-cultural ideology from the 1960s, it seems Anarchism today has filled the place traditionally occupied by Marxism on the cultural side of the radical left even though the contemporary is ripe with attempted revivals of the project of the Left from the revisionist Marxism of Michael Hardt's & Toni Negri's theories about Empire to Alain Badiou's and Slavoj Žižek's neo-Leninist approaches.
The Futurists wanted to set fire to the library shelves and flood the museums while the sigmanauts wanted to self-institutionalise their own economically independent and autonomous sigma-centres. The former expected a catastrophic revolution destroying the institutions and doing away with the shackles of papacy, monarchy and class structure, while the latter was more interested in a mental revolution and inner growth as a liberating practice, thus undermining and outflanking, instead of violently overthrowing, the existing institutions. In the early 21st century, it seems this movement has come full circle. No longer hell bent on destroying the institutions or simply ignoring them, much politically-themed art is back in the galleries and the museums even though it also maintains a presence in the public sphere. The return of ideas of collectivism, internationalism and networked organisation has led to revivals of older cultural experiments, such as street theatre, co-operative print workshops or free universities, as well as new preoccupations centred around the open source, free-ware, codes, nodes and intellectual property battles of the on-line world. These pragmatic and interdisciplinary practices of today combine visual production, media activism, political theory, research and protest in order to search for viable forms of alternative organisations as well as a rethinking of property relations. The central question for these groups is perhaps no longer a question of how to break with the institutions of art, but of how to constitute an active alternative over a duration in time without becoming part of or reaffirming what they started out to negate.
If art insists on wanting to make a difference, maybe it is necessary for it to leave the aesthetic realm behind as the specto-Situationists argued even though they were themselves obviously fascinated by the aesthetic and Debord returned to film-making after dissolving the remnants of the group in 1972. To really politicise art it has to stop being art and go beyond both art and politics where inner world and outer world, the ludic and the analytic, is unified in action. The failure, so far, of this struggle to realise art, which can be traced all the way through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, might be because the institutions are able to incorporate their own negation and strengthen themselves through it or it might be that it is simply an unrealisable strategy, a myth in the Sorelian sense, that keeps invigorating and driving an interventionist art which, in the long run, is not able to negate its own status as art or escape the marketplace that commodifies and collects it. On the other hand, during the 2000s, simultaneously with a focus on the ideals of independence from the existing state or market structures, practitioners of these new hybrid art forms have approached the social-democratic institutions of art pragmatically and found them a useful source of material support while, conversely, the institutions have found the cultural wing of the new social movements attractive, albeit unlikely these institutions will be able to transform themselves in the ways that an activist practice might propose. This points to that the conditions which Futurism wanted to disrupt and that forced sigma out of the established art world in order to engage with politics to some extent has been reversed in the contemporary. Seeing that neo-liberal policies continue to bring public institutions into the embrace of the market place, it seems most likely, though, that the accommodation will be short-lived. When art practices today result in temporary overlaps between aesthetic practice and revolutionary ideas in the currents of the counter-globalisation movement, the struggles of migrants or the movement against precarisation, they may perhaps be briefly exploited and marketed in the art field, but if, as Bradley also notes, national Arts Councils are sponsoring the revolution, it is very unlikely to be the revolution. The struggles through which the radical themes might be realised and the contradictions with the surrounding global capitalist system are rarely discussed. Instead, it is the art of maintaining social balances through the management of cultural trends.
In the final analysis, it seems that the revolutionary project needs not only to be rethought from top to bottom but, above all, to be re-imagined and dreamed anew in order to engage with reality in a meaningful way and wake up from the spell of images, its dreamless dream-state. Gerald Raunig, who, in his Art and Revolution (2007), theorises activist art as 'revolutionary machines', assemblages of images, people and statements, writes that in order to go beyond Leninist notions of revolution “every resistance has to be imagined in both its complicity and its relation to power, insurrection not as national civil war but as a recurrent, post-national insurrection of non-conforming masses, and constituent power as an ever-new experiment with alternative forms of organisation producing something other than state apparatuses”. Art, and visual representation in general, has a role to play in this, since art is part of our cultural imaginary, the myths which enable us to produce alternatives to the bio-political production of subjectivity and engage in collective wish production by visualising alternatives and dream about the future, not to mention engage with the seemingly impossible dream of a life outside capitalism by the affirmation of different forms of consumption.
(Press release)
Written by Søren Thilo Funder:
One With Face – One Without
The colors are bright and overflowing, a firework of light and joy, playfulness and phantasm, a searing pink, a loud blue, a glistening yellow, a deep red, a rainbow of child play and explosive energy, a man empties his insides on the living room floor.
The figures are comical, the buildings are curious, the characters naively recognizable, the situation is witty and the scenario stirs up a laughter, a man is being lynched by two hooded executioners.
The composition is crisp, the lines are intriguingly puzzling, the depth is tricking the eye, the details are stealthy and calculated, a catapult is launching severed heads into an armored castle.
Behind the fortress walls monstrous creatures are feasting on children dolls with pouched lips, big eyes, tight boobs and heavy makeup. Pirate ships are cruising sickly waters, loaded with faceless snipers, Lego demons and tabloid devils. Wars are being waged in dreamy forests between fantasy monsters and plastic tanks, the soldiers ranging from action force figures to dismantled celebrities. The scenarios question the position of the real. The appropriated elements from our existing world, constantly battles the made-up elements, in a tournament of the right to claim the fantasy realm. Where does fantasy begin and where does reality actually end?
The spaces are deform conceptions of adult nurseries, where human beings learn to exist among one another and maneuver appropriate in society, a learning process bathing in voluptuous erotic misconceptions, bland violent behavior and a grotesque madness of flaws and failures.
But there is something further to explore, there seems to be something leading beyond the nauseatingly, all-consuming tableaus. There seems to be a hole. It shifts around. It moves in dodging swirls amongst the battles, orgies and rituals; a hole that might be a cave, a portal, a wormhole, a faceless person, a separate place or at least the proposition for an escape route, a way beyond and beneath the suffocating displays of human nature run astray.
The presence of these holes, gaps and cracks offers the existing of alternative opportunities. Perhaps the monsters are helpers, focusing our rage, our dreams, our ambitions and our drives? Perhaps the crooked houses are actually pleasant living quarters fitting those that normally do not fit? Perhaps the violence is answers written in a language still to be translated? Perhaps the depraved, the perverted, the adolescent and immoral is a means to bring back the notion of right? Perhaps the filth is fertilizer for beauty?
Written by Theis Wendt, in danish.
ROOM!
I September 2008 er jeg 6 dage i Istanbul for at lave et værk i det offentlige rum i forbindelse med et kunstudvekslingsprojekt. Jeg beslutter at lave et stort hvidt rum af træplader, der skal rulles ned ad gaden.
Efter et par dages søgen efter plads til at arbejde, får jeg lov til at bygge rummet i Nil’s baggård. Materialerne er købt ind og leveret og to venner hjælper med konstruktionen.
Byggeriet er i fuld gang, da en gammel mand kommer ud af sin lejlighed og begynder at skælde os ud. Nil prøver at forklare at der er tale om et kunstprojekt. Hele situationen eskalerer ud i et stort skænderi. Manden får åbenbart nok og styrter ind i sin lejlighed og kommer stormende ud med et stoleben hævet truende over hovedet, klar til at pande Nil ned. ”HEY, HEY, HEY!”, råber vi alle totalt overrasket og prøver at få manden til at slappe af og siger til vores ven, at vi bare stopper projektet med det samme, hvis det skaber så mange problemer. Efter diskussion frem og tilbage virker den sure nabo mere rolig og Nil insisterer på at vi fortsætter.
En time senere, kommer en politibetjent med den sure nabo bag sig, ind i baggården. Han har åbnet sit pistolcover og virker klar til at trække sin revolver hvis der skulle opstå problemer. Betjenten beordrer os til at stoppe arbejdet og forlade området øjeblikkeligt. Vi smider værktøjet fra os og kalder på Nil. Hun kommer hurtig ud og snakker længe med politibetjenten. Det viser sig, at den vrede mand fra ejendommen havde anmeldt til politiet, at en flok vandaler var ved at terrorisere hans baggård og at beboerne var bange. Vi stopper arbejdet den dag.
Om morgenen næste dag smutter jeg over til Nil for at hente materialerne. Heldigvis er væggene der stadig og det eneste ændret er et par lange rifter skåret i træet. Jeg mistænker den vrede nabo for sabotagen.
Modulerne bliver kørt hen til mit hostel, da det nu er det eneste sted jeg har mulighed for at male og samle rummet. Ejeren har givet mig lov til at arbejde op af en væg over for hostelet. Men parkeringsdrengene er ikke meget for det, da alle materialerne fylder for 3-4 parkeringspladser. De forstår ikke helt hvad vi har gang i, men giver os alligevel lov til sidst.
Planen er, at når rummet står samlet vil jeg rulle det, i samarbejde med dem som skulle have lyst, ned for enden af gaden og ud på Istiklal cad. (tilsvarende strøget i København) for at se hvad der vil ske.
Sez, en caféejer vi har mødt et par dage før, kommer for at hjælpe til. Da Sez hørte om planen råder han mig kraftigt til ikke at udfører projektet på hovedgaden. Han er overbevist om at politiet vil anholde os alle sammen og tage os med til forhør, på grund af de mange bombesprængninger der har været i byen. Han tilbyder at vi kan gøre hvad vi har lyst til på gaden ved hans cafe. Sez mener, at det er ham der bestemmer i det område. Vi siger tak og transporterer modulerne der ned. konstruktionen bliver bygget og vi begynder at rulle rummet ned ad gaden…